Arrange your ideas. Be methodical. Be orderly. That is the secret of success. — Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie)
It feels strange to start the New Year in the Summer season.
I must confess - I have recently been struggling with keeping up with writing and maintaining the good creative habits I set for myself at the very beginning of the year. It’s too warm and humid here in Auckland and all the traveling does not help to keep the routines in check either. But I don’t complain: I know the following months will continue to be eventful in trips and gatherings. In adventures. (Expect to see more of those in this newsletter when I catch up on that!) It’ll be only during the second Summer later in the year that I’ll settle back into my routines.
Indeed, 2024 will be the year of the two summers.
And before I depart back to where I come from, I wanted to reflect, review, and celebrate the artists I have come across in my year living in New Zealand.
Recently, I have become more and more interested in learning art and creativity through the lives of other artists. I’ve come to appreciate that it is in their personal stories (where they come from, their torments, their interests, the places they visited, what they did for a living…) where a big part of the lessons can be learned.
Louise Henderson
I was fortunate to discover her in Christchurch’s Art Gallery on my last trip to the South Island. I didn’t hesitate to purchase her book From Life, which I am currently reading. Even though it's a big volume I’ll have to fly back to the other side of the world, it’s one of those special books you can’t get anywhere else.
Henderson’s story is interesting to me because she is a French artist who emigrated to New Zealand, bringing her European influences with her and looking at a beautiful remote foreign place with fresh eyes. She experimented with different approaches, embracing abstraction later in her career. Her works are abstract paintings with a vibrant and particular way of using and mixing colour.
In the end, it’s all about shapes, colour and light.
Robin White
Robin White is everywhere in Auckland.
We arrived in New Zealand just a few days after the exhibition at the Auckland Gallery closed. But I could at least enjoy and read the book that was published as part of it.
White’s paintings are bold and illustration-looking. She flattens up a landscape, or a set of layers (person’s portrait, building, landscape) to control the framing of a view. She uses lines and a controlled palette to simplify the information while contrasting elements in the composition at the same time.
There is something timeless and mystical in her paintings. Some sort of quiet energy.
Rita Angus
Later Cook, and also New Zealand-born, Rita’s paintings appealed to me from the first moment I saw them. I love her palette and the way she flattens up an image to give it that surrealist, illustrative look.
Other artists
It was in one of my wanders around the Public Library in Auckland that I came across the book New Zealand Art. From Cook to Contemporary. This book published by Te Papa Museum in Wellington is a fantastic collection of some of the best artists in Aotearoa New Zealand.
These are some names I’ll keep researching and learning from: Colin McCahon, Don Binney (very similar style to Robin White and Rita Angus - I am starting to appreciate there’s a particular painting style amongst artists of that generation here in NZ), Milan Mrkusich, Mt Woollaston, W.A. Sutton (that style again), Doris Lusk (and again), Patrick Hayman, Olivia Spencer Bower, John Weeks, Rata Lovell-Smith, Frances Hodgkins, Rhona Haszard, Maud Sherwood, and Raymond McIntyre.
And these are some pictures of the pages.
Happy reading! 📚✨
Ana
📚 What I’m reading in January 2024:
Louise Henderson. From Life by Felicity Milburn, Lara Strongman, and Julia Waite.
New Zealand Art. From Cook to Contemporary, published by Museum of Te Papa (Wellington).
Black Coffee play by Agatha Christie, adapted to a novel by Charles Osborne.
Thank you for this! I can jot wait to go look up these artists so that I can see more of their art.